So Good at Being in Trouble
by ninety6tears
Summary: Faye tries to leave the Bebop for a better life. It's not like Jet would ever ask her to stay.
1. Chapter 1

They spent the first couple months fucking around in bounty lounges and broke towns, scrounging for the leads and tips they couldn't get on the tube anymore, trying to figure out if they were still some kind of partnership in a lot of mutually furtive ways. Faye actually thanked Jet for fixing dinner, once he was able to start cooking on his feet again.

But she wasn't really eating much, and this bothered him. He jibed at her once to call attention to it, a little nasty—"I'm sorry it's not gourmet."

"You mean sorry it's not poison?" she muttered.

A fall of a second, and they both slouched, the atmosphere pained and ashamed. She slowly picked up the fork.

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"What about the piracy happening around Europa?" she suggested in the morning, yanking a comb through her hair.

"What about it?"

"Silas Voleg, whatever his name is. We could see if there's any info on the records from his arrest that they wouldn't let out to the public."

"Sure, if you've got an entry code."

"But we've been—"

"Ed always got us in the mainframe."

She wanted to veer out, so she asked, stupidly, if they had any more of that coffee.

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Jet kept cleaning things, fixing things, checking up and down the whole ship. She wished he'd stop. The echoes were probably getting to both of them.

Faye's thumb absently chipped away at the last of the paint on her toenails as she was sitting and watching him later from the hall: his back muscles were wound up tense, it looked like, as he tended to the bonsai garden. Some zen he'd always had going. The thought felt like something thick in her throat. It felt tiring to breathe, these days.

He was turning to reach for something, and whatever it was that made him glance her way, she looked back down.

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It was a few weeks still before she saw Jet finally take Spike's old ragged t-shirt off the drying rack next to the sink, hold the collar under his chin to gingerly fold it on his chest into a neat and cold square, and carry it to some place where she would never see it again.

Faye took an unnecessary amount of showers, long dazed showers, which they had a couple fights about when the water filter was already in need of replacing again. They even managed a senseless argument when Faye told him for the second time that no, she was never the one that wouldn't eat garlic so he could make it however the hell he wanted for this hungry little princess, and later she thought to herself wasn't it just fine to realize her appetite was coming back with a vengeance and they didn't exactly have a wealth of food.

By gradual necessity, they had to figure out how to work, just the two of them. Their first bounty in months was after a bumpy road and not much of a payoff for the time they put into finding him. But Jet had been cracking away at some kind of plan, making a lot of calls to get to this bootlegger last seen in a heavily Romanian mining colony; Faye was finally able to find an old buddy of his to shake down for info by sticking her long legs into a bar full of depressed dead-end workers, and that was actually a pretty good score.

"No races," she pledged in a sigh as he was handing over her share.

"Don't make promises," he grunted, and she immediately wondered where the inclination had come from, to talk like it was their money rather than his and hers divided sharply down the middle.

As it turned out she celebrated with drinks instead, starting with fancy cocktails and then descending into stiffer shots. And as it turned out he topped off their luck at the same bar, seated on the opposite end so that she didn't even notice him there until a couple other customers filling the middle seats had left. They acknowledged each other, but remained in their separate foggy pockets of space, wounds sulking underneath.

Then one night they managed to have something of a long conversation, trying to fill the quiet of the ship, and Faye admitted she had never played chess. Jet approached it with a strange humor, satisfied that she wouldn't have the patience for it ("This won't be like your dice bets") even as he turned on the game board.

Once they were in the thoughtful flow of it enough to talk and play at the same time, he brought up that he'd been thinking. A security company on Mars was expanding their clientele and trying to get a ton of people for new contracts, and several bounty hunter acquaintances of his had been looking into it.

Of course they'd both heard about this kind of thing, hunters retiring into menial guard duty once chasing fugitives around was no longer their speed, and it had generally been a given that that just wasn't for them, or so Faye thought. Obviously the idea of real regular income had held its appeal during the hungrier weeks, but there had been such an unspoken, barely even contemplated understanding that they were in this life because they would feel cornered staying in one place too long. It was hard to remember what the bishop can do while realizing that this maybe hadn't applied so fundamentally to Jet all along, while it had been possibly the most inextricable thing with herself.

"You must still be pretty soured on the ISSP to not just go in for some desk job with them," she remarked.

One of his eyebrows moved in confusion. "Well, if you…"

It took her a second to remember it was still her turn, he hadn't just trailed off to consider the game. "What?"

Bothered, he made a dismissive flinch. "It was just a harebrained idea."

That familiar grumpy front would have made her roll her eyes if she wasn't feeling a self-serving relief, and besides, she was getting used to Jet being twice the sourpuss he talked about any given woman being. She finally picked her next move, assuring, "We just have to catch a big one, a really good one, and we'll be set, you know?"

Surprisingly, he received that with the smallest of smiles, but he said nothing, probably because that's what they'd been saying to themselves day and night ever since they met, and longer.

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Jet's leg was still slowing him down some, like it was healing funny, so now that they were enough out of the red, he stopped into a proper med lab to get it looked at. He had to give himself shots in the thigh for a week or two.

The nurse said, "You'll get used to administering it yourself, but I could show someone else how to do it for you..." She was looking just briefly out the mirror window into the hallway, where Faye was pacing and chewing on the gum she only seemed to have for smoke-free buildings.

He scoffed. "No thanks."

In the absence of her betting habits, Faye had taken to running some of her old petty thievery. He didn't ask how she'd gotten into the work locker of one of the surgeons, just raised an eyebrow when she fanned herself with the gift voucher for some French restaurant and asked him if he had anything nicer to wear.

He dug out a rumpled old blazer and she put on a simple black dress, and they didn't make much of the outing. "How do you like my cooking?" she teased when he had quickly wolfed through his bourbuignon, and he rolled his eyes without any real roughness.

They floated apart, Jet having his cigarette with a slow daydream while she took to the adjacent room where all the wine tasters were talking over the music. He waved the server over for another drink and didn't think anything of it when she didn't return for almost an hour.

When she did emerge again, there was a man with her. From Jet's vantage point he looked just shy of obviously good-looking, all warmly colored with chestnut hair and eyes and a tan, but a bit rangy and graceless. He wondered what she was up to, seeing the hand guiding against her back with gentlemanly ease. He saw him seem to charm a small smile out of her and had the impression that the whole picture would make more sense if they were drunk and tripping against each other, physical through clumsier means.

After a minute, Faye looked his way just to give a vague signal of "Don't wait up for me" on her way out the door with him. The man traced her glance and then gave Jet a friendly wave; this surprised Jet for some reason, and he just gave him a nod before the moment broke away and the man's hand joined Faye's and they were out of there.

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When she hadn't shown up to the_ Bebop_ by late the next night, he figured she'd had her fun with the guy and then run off to spend his money somewhere. When she didn't come back the night after that, the assumptions started thinning out. The morning after the third night he was working on a pain in the ass hatch door that had rusted shut when she finally called.

"Hey, are you still docked?"

"Where else would I be? Hurry it up."

She ended the call abruptly.

Later on when he heard her steps coming around the curve, he yelled, "Listen, could you go see if I left that oil can next to the stairs?"

Instead of changing direction she came steadily up to him, squinting. "You mean that one you've got strapped to your belt?"

He looked down. "Oh."

He got back into a crouch close to the lower bolts, as she did nothing. When he became aware that she was just standing there watching him work for a moment, he granted her a smirk.

"Got a little more than a meal ticket, huh?" It was a little off-key from their usual attempts at banter, but he didn't know what else to say—and though an apology for keeping him waiting would have been nice on top of spectacularly rare, he was feeling a sticky urge to mind his own business on this one.

And then Faye started reluctantly to talk, and for the next couple minutes it became very confusing for him that he was hearing some things about Francis Jud. He was an heir of some gas tycoon. He was currently investing some of his money into show horses, but also had an interest in backing MONO racers. "Frank" wasn't what someone might have expected; he was humble, understanding.

"What does he smell like?" Jet quipped. "I'm dying to know."

Faye laughed, and he looked over at her now, because something was just strange about that laugh. Nervous.

They regarded each other through the dim light, until she looked away, shifting around.

"What?" he finally prodded.

He had just gone back to trying the wrench on one of the bolts when she explained, "He wants to take care of me."

His motions came to a stop. Looking down, he set the spanner on the floor, resting his arms on his haunches. He took in a breath and let it out, looking up finally. "Does this guy pay any muscle?"

"No," she quickly protested, "it's not like...he's not like…he lives in a penthouse with his mom, his sister and her kid. They have a maid and a driver. If you're thinking I couldn't leave anytime I wanted...if you just met the guy. He's almost too soft."

"Did you tell him about your debts?" His eyes grilled hers, quickly catching the answer. "Faye, he just met you, what do you think he's expecting?"

She swallowed, eyes darting around the floor.

Abruptly, with an indifferent gesture, he amended the whole line of inquiry with, "You can handle yourself."

Somehow that wasn't good enough for her. "I just hoped...maybe you'd think I wouldn't go and do this unless he really was a good guy."

Amazed: "Like I could give a shit."

"Then why did—"

"Would you quit it?" He was standing up now, his mood darkening, a noise of sharp incredulous air coming out of him before he picked up the words. "Think about who you're talking to right now. Do you really think the small chunk of money you've helped me make breaks you anywhere close to even with me? Is it possible you've paid me back for even half the eating and drinking and smoking and pampering you've helped yourself to on my ship? When you weren't _stealing_? You'd cheat the shirt off my back, Faye. And now at the first chance of shinier digs it's 'That's it, I'm gone, good luck getting the next woolong' and I'm all ready to let you go without bothering you about any of that, and what is it? You want me to _reassure_ you that you're not a taker?"

She'd been slowly struck back into the usual frostiness. "Fine, well, at least I'm out of your way finally. Once I'm settled I can send you—"

"I don't want that guy's money," he snapped, almost surprising himself with the sudden tone of disgust.

It seemed to finally upset any handle she'd had on this nice little talk. Reaching up a hand to scratch at her hair, she just said, sounding tired, "Have it your way, Jet. I'm getting my stuff," and within seconds she'd gone down the corridor.

His grip on everything he touched was tight, ready to snap. He stayed where he was, well inside the ship, where he knew he wouldn't hear her leave.


	2. Chapter 2

Incidentally, he was listening to the broadcast of a MONO race when he got the call.

He was lying on his back, reaching for the rickety stool that sometimes served as a nightstand to snub out the last of a cigarette, and felt like ignoring the alert when it first came through. He was drowsy and wasn't clocking very well; it could have been just twenty minutes or much longer before the call came again, beeping the alert endlessly when he tried to let it go. Sighing, he reached and clipped the handheld unit on without picking it up, sitting up first to rub at his eyes. "Yeah?"

"...Can you come get me?"

Jabbed to alertness, it wasn't just the voice but the strange meekness of it that made him pull up the screen to look closer.

There was weak light coming in from the window next to Faye where she sat on an upholstered chair. She looked—different?—kind of freshly pretty in a neat high-necked sweater, but there was something low in her composure. She was hunched, frowning numbly aside from a wary searching of what she saw of him. He was waiting for some elaboration, but that didn't occur to her, and in a second he shook himself out of staring a moment too long.

"Where are you?"

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Faye watched Frank's mother Mary fiddle with the flowers she'd just put in a vase. She had changed, but Mary was still in her funeral dress.

Mary was in her fifties but carried the frailty of someone closer to seventy. Her kindness was never weakened, a trait which Faye was finding increasingly unnerving.

"It's not a surprise he had you in the will," she was saying. "He meets with Mister Kenner once a year just for the talk and the bourbon, but it would have been the perfect time to bring up he was getting married and get that squared away."

"Mary," she protested tiredly, "I brought all of this on him. How can I take it?"

"Darling," she sternly assured, "it might have happened to you if not to him."

This was of course very unlikely, but Mary didn't know enough about her to understand that she was pretty used to handling people she'd ripped off or pissed off in some other way, some forever ago. She couldn't even quite remember what she'd taken from this guy Sonny the Sprog, even if there was no forgetting that stupid name, and she couldn't stop thinking, God, if only the bastard hadn't left after following them home to get more of his cronies, if only she hadn't volunteered to take a walk down to the bakery for Frank's favorite pastries. If she'd just been there. If Frank hadn't turned out to be just that much of a dumb hero after all.

As she was lost in thought, Mary was coming to sit down next to her. "He was such a restless man before you came along. It's hard to explain. But for that short time, you settled him, and he was so happy just to live here with you. And I love you for that."

The woman's voice crackled. The moment was unbearable; tears welled in Mary's eyes, and Faye's chest tightened at knowing she herself hadn't been able to cry.

"I'm well taken care of here. Please, take the money. And go where you can be safe," she pleaded, her hands on Faye's. "For me."

It was hard to say if there was somewhere she could go, but she knew she had a ride. The _Bebop_ had been at the docks for a while when she got there. She sat on the long boardwalk for a few minutes with her suitcase, waiting for it to pull up.

Jet came up to deck and didn't say anything until he stepped out to meet her, and he went straight for the heaviest of her multiple suitcases.

"The _Red Tail_?" he finally prompted, carrying it aboard.

"It's in the shop."

"There's some food on the stove if you want it," he added without looking back at her. She let out a burdened breath of air and followed him.

Later she told him the short version—that it had taken her only 118 days to destroy Frank's life—and then she went down deck to make it clear he didn't have to say anything in reply. After a moment he'd just be annoyed, probably, that she was already making herself at home in her old cabin without asking first.

Passing by the open rooms, she noticed the rumpled hill of blanket on the bed where he slept, some clutter of mechanical junk he was working on and—

She stopped, backing up a step.

She hadn't hesitated to leave the antique TV set when she took off so quickly, having impulsively reasoned that it was unwieldy garbage. She would have claimed that leaving the tape itself had made as much sense, but there had been a bitter feeling about it, and maybe an idea that she might as well leave some part of herself here that she wasn't wanting to look at anymore but couldn't actually destroy.

But seeing the television and the VCR set up there over the power source on the little crappy desk, tucked away in Jet's own room, gave her pause.

It was more than surprise, for a moment, her stance locked there. But just as reflexively, she decided in another second that she had not noticed it, and kept walking. It would end up in storage along with the tape, where Jet of course would tell her he'd put it it as soon as she'd left, if she ever asked about it.

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The ship wasn't flush with fuel right now, so they had to stay put on Mars until Jet found a promising job, or so he thought. It would've made it easier if he brought up the subject of money, but he didn't, and without any urgent need to get off the planet she couldn't get herself to say anything.

Days passed. She wasn't able to tell if she was leaving her private spaces enough to even know if he was reluctant to approach her in return, but they exchanged routine enough information when they had to.

She did settle onto the couch for a while one night after finding herself getting out of the shower, putting on her nice silk dressing gown, and putting on by autopilot the nighttime drama Mary had loved to watch every week. This had seemed like a harmless half-formed idea, but a hazy recollection took over in her mind, of switching over to the right channel for her parents' favorite crime show on the same night every week.

What had she been using the guy for? A woman's debt-soaked desperation, or a little girl's misplaced homesickness? She didn't know which one was worse to consider now. She only understood, now that she'd made a big mess of it, how Frank had immediately appealed to her in glowing white lights as the kind of man she thought that the _real Faye_—the fiction, this imagined figure of who she would have grown into _if only—_might have gone on to marry. And in trying to secure some homey warmth she'd lost forever, she'd gotten not being alone, even if it also felt like being a guest in her own bedroom, and nights when no matter how many times she told herself he wouldn't mind if she woke him up she just lay there staring at the ceiling, breathing through vague swathes of longing and grief.

"How long has that light been doing that?"

Jet's voice, heavy as always, wasn't an unwelcome distraction. She didn't flinch at it, just belatedly realized what he was talking about when she noticed one of the lightbulbs was flickering at the ceiling close to the stairs.

She saw as he brought over the step ladder that he was already wearing his sleep clothes, sweats and an undershirt. She hit the keyboard to turn the noise down a few notches. "I could go look for a bulb," she offered dully.

He cast a glance at her, briefly piercing, shook his head. "I doubt I've picked up any. I'll just twist it off for now."

After he did this, the place was half dim, differently shaped in unfamiliar shadows. She heard the slow steps of him getting off the ladder, and a small grunt. His hand was worrying at his right leg; he limped around to the couch and she automatically shifted over to make room when he sat down on her left to nurse it. Mary's show rolled into a commercial.

Faye could smell Jet next to her. Sometimes when she came back to the _Bebop_ after a long enough absence she realized how well she knew the smell of the place—a constant blend of different oils, something unpleasantly rubbery in some areas, but in the places you hit farther inside, surprising hints of camphor, lemongrass, wet earth. While Jet carried a lot of that smell she realized now that she knew his scent too. A distinct redolence that wasn't exactly pleasant or unpleasant, but right.

"Isn't that thigh healed up by now?" she asked as he extended his leg a couple times, tried to rub a soreness out of it.

"The shot's healed up as good as it will be, but I always had that bit of knee pain. It's almost like keeping off this leg made it get worse instead of better."

In the light coming off the screen which she hadn't been paying much attention to, she could see him hiking his sleep pants up to the thigh, working his thumbs above the kneecap. She swallowed, a little reluctant. After a minute she used her foot to push the table a little bit forward. "Let me have a go at it."

He tensed in puzzlement.

"My mother did acupressure for the other ladies in the neighborhood. I used to like to watch."

Not looking into his eyes, she moved to sit on the table and his knee moved over only when she scooped it out with her own leg. She leaned over and pressed on a couple places with the heels of her hands in a slow gentle pressure, trying to concentrate on the task rather than, doubtless, the fact he was staring at her in light of the new casually dropped revelation.

The other distraction, of course, was the awkward realization that she had probably never elected to touch him so casually before. The room was a little drafty; her hands must be cold. They'd warm up. He could take this and sit there and wonder for how long she'd been being or at least remembering being a completely different person, if he'd been living with a version of her that was half a stranger, wonder whether it was the old Faye or the one he'd always known who'd decided to leave him in the dust. Wonder which version was a bigger pain in the ass. Let someone else wonder about it for a while so she could get a break.

To her slight dismay though, he made it unnecessarily complicated by asking, in a strange low voice, "How long have you…?"

"Since before Spike left," she said, and that name was like throwing out the stub: this line of talk is a dead end, over. And he did leave it, by pulling his knee away from her, but then, in an impulse that shocked her somewhere in the stomach, he touched her chin very gently, making her look at him, and she saw those wonderings she'd been assuming but they were deeper, more restless in his look than she'd expect.

She looked up at him, breathing like she was holding her ground, the silence of the mostly empty ship swelling to her ears, and then finally in a self-conscious flinch of coming to his senses he took his hand away.

He got a cigarette out of her pack and then lit it, eyes brooding down almost apologetically. It came over her in a cold wave, the likelihood that he was about to stand up and leave, and the fact that she didn't want him to, that she might have told him anything just now if he hadn't taken his hand off her even though that was definitely a lie.

"You know what part of it really eats at me?" she muttered, moving for the box of cigarettes, pausing: "Oh, you used the last match."

He looked lost for a second and just passed her the one he was smoking. She took a long drag then handed it back.

"It's that you were right." She let it sit for a few seconds. "Obviously I didn't…you know, _love_ him. I could almost forget all about it if it had just been about the money, but I took the other things he gave me. And that's worse because all I could give him was my time and my company. I gave him nothing but the trouble that killed him, and he gave me so much, and I have to live with that...I'm not bothering you to reassure me, just...don't tell me I can never admit that you're right."

He saw right through it. "Faye, I wouldn't give a rat's ass if it was like that—'A fool and his money,' you know that one?—but the deal is this guy's dead and it sounds like you ought to respect him enough to give him a little more credit. Only the type of absolute shitbird you would never want to hang around for longer than a day could actually believe you'd have married him that fast out of blind passion. You just can't consider the idea that you did something or were something that made him crazy enough to decide he wanted to look out for you."

She laughed, short and nervous. "Come on. He was a nice guy, but nobody does that."

He disagreed with a kind of patient fervency, "Everybody is like that, with the right person. Or with just any person, the way it looks to anyone but them...Most of us just don't have the luxury of doing that much about it."

There was a declarative silence after that. He leaned over to put out the cigarette. She hoped he wouldn't look up at her then, but he did, and went still.

Clearing his throat after that awkward freeze, he granted, "That only makes you feel worse, huh."

She'd put some previous effort into making sure he never saw her cry. The slight tears were an overwhelmed uncertainty at hitting this verge much harder than before. For once she was feeling rather than just knowing what she was always doing to herself by doing things to other people, the recklessness she threw at her life with all the sense that it didn't matter because she was unfinished, incomplete, only alive by some parasitic negative number that ate and ate away.

Jet said, "I'll go."

Her hand landed back on his knee before she could think. "Wait."

His hand clasped on top of hers just as thoughtlessly. At the realization of it the movement caught both of them in something still, a stick-up, nobody move.

"What?" he demanded hoarsely, as if she could explain.

"That's okay," she whispered simply.

"_What_?" he whispered back.

She used her other forearm to quickly wipe at the thin layer of tears, and she was scooting forward now, holding his hand up. He was stunned into pliability. She held it by the back, and slipped it into her dressing gown, over her left breast. She muttered wryly, "That's what."

"The fuck," he hissed, but after a few seconds his hand did move, his eyes opening wider as he felt her skin there. His thumb, palpably calloused, drew a slight tease of a line that sent eager heat through her. She leaned to move her right hand in a sliding caress up his firm thigh, pouring herself into his touch which was tentatively circling and squeezing her now, and she heard his breath going ragged. Something in him turned her loneliness more into helpless tightening desire second by second, as he reminded her he was pulsing, real, held for now inside of her life. She could see in more detail than before the scar tissue next to his knee, and she wanted—something, some affirmation of their tangibility to each other.

She went to lift up his undershirt, and then he caught her hand, halting.

"Fuck me, this is _not_ a good idea."

"Can we skip this part?" she tried to tease. "It's not like you have anything to be shy about. Or have you forgotten the last time I cheated the shirt off your back?"

"Don't joke."

"I would really like to feel good right now. I think you know how to make me. And I don't buy that you're made of stone either."

His eyes tight and measuring for a fairly long moment, he slowly moved his hand back up just to feel along a hem of the silk, fingering the tie between his thumb and forefinger. Finally he said, "He bought you this?"

"Yeah, of course," she replied tartly.

"Take it off."

She got up and moved slowly onto his lap. The tie came loose and he used one hand to spread the panels apart, pull them down and away with further deliberate slowness. She had no time to second guess her own expanding nakedness before he was propping her up with the same arm to mouth slowly at her breast, one then the other, and the noises she made were gasps turning slowly into a groan.

It all became more fragmented, less cautious; with a straddling movement of her thighs she felt his ample hardness against her, reached to brush slowly down his abs with her palms until she could feel his nervous anticipation as a faint, tightly wound tremor, and then reached low to squeeze at his cock over the thin fabric of his pants.

His head fell into her shoulder with his rough noises as she undulated the touch. After a moment she edged her lap back into his. It was hard to keep her legs around him and she had to lean back to rock in a straddle against him, tease him that way. When she felt something cold at her torso she gasped, looking down to see him moving his metal arm back at his side with a shuttered apology in his look. But she reached for it, placing it back at her ribs where she knew it would warm up, and somehow relished the slight sting of hard cold clutching her up and down now in their restless bucking motions.

She felt that tight melancholy in her throat, that need to feel something deeply good and from him she could almost sense his need to make her feel it, and maybe something else, a simple urgency drawn by the long time since or just the long time alone. She finally relented into the twisting motion they seemed to initiate in simultaneous impatience, loosening her legs and pulling at his shirt and his drawstring as he turned her on her side and then on her back.

He didn't land his full weight on her but there was an immediate feeling of being caved underneath his size, bringing a gulping sense of the magnitude of this act, and already the part of him released as he pushed his pants off was now nudging between her thighs, as she drew her knees up around him. She hadn't been a shy virgin since before she was put to sleep, even with Whitney she'd instinctively thought so, and of course she and her honorable betrothed had had their share of candlelight spooning; but Frank had always been almost too careful, too sweet, ultimately unknowable in what was supposed to be so intimate.

There had been so little of him, and there was so much of Jet. Now it was sudden vertigo to think that any of that had barely been sex at all compared to the sheer naked size of what was happening, something more mindless and crucial, Jet's hard broad surfaces moving muscle under her fingers as he strained in his slowness, his cock breaching her in one very gradual aching thrust.

She gasped a little and somehow her tight little gripping around his upper ribs managed to convey that she needed a second but not to stop: he didn't pull back but froze, the silence and the pause reaching a smell of musky sweat, his anxious breath above her a whiff of tobacco and tea. He had to feel her tight breathing. "Baby?" he rasped, not so much an endearment as a fumbling vague question in a half-forgotten code.

When she didn't have an answer, he nudged his mouth into the space of her neck, along her jaw and below her ear and all around, the skin and nerves rising to a sensitive delicious shock as he kissed with his lips and tongue and light grazes of his beard. This attention distracted her until she felt more restlessly his length inside of her, closed her eyes and began rocking up into him to take him deeper. He kept still for a few seconds, clenched with his eyes closed in a soft groan, enjoying her doing that.

Then she felt his steel arm scooping in her waist as he positioned himself to fuck her, and when he did fuck her they were both intermittently panting and moaning, sounds that could have echoed far throughout the desolate ship, sounds of long pent-up abandon being roughed out of them. Her only words were yes; his was "Faye," whoever that was, in the choked gasp that made her reach her hand around his neck and pull his mouth to hers for the first time, her eyes closed, the result of this a hazy gentling kiss that tipped her into wordless noises and the plateau at which she would come with a feeling like her bones were finally settling down.

When it was over, he put his pants back on, maybe avoiding her gaze as he did so. She watched this with an increasing wariness, self-consciously wrapping back into her robe, trembling a little, the room cold again.

To her surprise, when he stood up he muttered, "Come on," and then leaned over and scooped her up in his arms.

He carried her all the way to her bed and settled her down in it.

She was trying to catch his eyes. "Jet," she said, having no clue what she'd say.

"It's getting late," he said. He flipped the light off, and walked out.

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In the afternoon she didn't find him anywhere inside. She'd slept in pretty late and her head was aching for some coffee. She took the last of the concentrated stuff, gulping a lot of it down when it was still almost scalding. She put on the first breezy blouse her hand met inside of one of her still unpacked suitcases.

She opened the hatch to the fishing deck and didn't feel like turning back for a jacket even though the chill immediately licked bumps along her skin, but that cold made her feel even more the cornered reluctance to go up to where Jet was taking things down from the drying line.

It might even snow later. Once when she'd lamented the bullshit of artificial weather systems bothering with the cold, Jet had explained from his strange reserves of knowledge about how many kinds of crops needed a controlled frost to bump right. She hadn't even realized there was that much farming on Mars, and as luck would have it most of the land for it was close to the docking areas.

If she stepped closer to him, she knew she would have to abandon the expectation she'd woken up with, that the night before would be like a funny dream smeared with bad judgments and she would be reminded of the rough old man he always seemed to her in her most resentful moments. In the hesitation she stood with her arms knotted together, innerly peering at the realization that she wasn't even the young petty girl anymore who had looked at him that way, hadn't been for a while. And in fact the simple motion of his hand scratching in brief pause at the hair behind his ears, the shape of his shoulders underneath his t-shirt, gave her a small sweet rush of recollection. She wanted him again. What the hell, again after that. Enough times for the whole embarrassing tangle of emotion it might bring.

These thoughts fell into a thoughtful frown when his half-glance became a full glance carefully directed at her approach. He was calmly unreadable as he turned back to shake out a blanket before folding it up.

She tried silence for a minute, which was fine enough, watching people move in their coats and galoshes that looked tiny from the ship's distance and pretending not to be freezing her ass off.

"Look," he said, but faltered a bit.

"Got a light for one of those?" she asked, indicating his cigarettes. He took out his lighter and lit one for her. She thought he'd stall by taking one for himself, but he didn't. His lighter flicked closed, a clean hard noise she'd recognize in a dark bar with lighters clicking everywhere.

Jet started in. "The things I said to you when you left..."

She shrugged: _Nothing much worse than I deserved._

But he emphasized, "I don't want you to think I'm keeping some tally on what you owe me. The fact is, even then I'd been doing a lot of thinking, about what was going to have to change around here for us to have any way to get along together, to stop bickering like dogs all the time…"

Setting down a folded shirt, he leaned against the little table, smiling bitterly.

"My old man told me one time that the best day of a man's life is when he buys a boat, and the second best day of his life is when he sells it…I kept thinking, damn, it would be something to not have to be in charge of this thing anymore. To not have to get worried and get angry about it...not just the ship, but this _thing_, this whole operation…"

She felt a confused smile of affection creeping into her at his stumbling.

"The only way it's gonna work is to say that we're square. Whatever it is, money, favors, you know, you don't owe me. God knows you've had your share of debt collectors; they make you do things and act ways…" With a hint of severity that surprised her he insisted, "I don't want any part of that."

Faintly, feeling like he needed some affirmation, she said, "Fine," though she didn't feel caught up.

"And I wish…" He wiped his hands over his eyes for a second. "Fuck, Faye, I really wish I'd somehow said this...before."

If he meant that he thought last night would have been different somehow, she elected not to console that right now. What a mess. "I've been meaning to tell you something, too. And it's going to complicate things if you really mean what you just said."

Catching onto the impish suspense there, he cocked an expectant eyebrow.

"Jet," she said, "I've got a shit-load of woolongs."

"...Come again."

"Did you ever consider it? It's not like I made off with all of his money like some regular femme fatale. It's more like ten percent, but believe me, that's more than enough for a new start."

"But you weren't even married yet. City law says you can only inherit—"

"After two years of marriage or documented partnership, unless funds are specifically drawn out in the will."

"And you were in it? Are you kidding me? What kinda guy even drafts a will before he hits thirty anymore?"

"Rich guys," Faye said simply.

"How much?"

"I'll whisper it in your ear some time."

He flushed for a second and just thought it over, astonished. "Well, it's good. It's good for you."

"Jet, shut up," she groused.

"Faye…"

"I'm gonna take care of you," she insisted impatiently. "Please, you've got to let me do that. Otherwise the money just feels dirty."

"Trust me, that feeling will wear off once you get going. Anyway, you don't need me to tell you it wasn't exactly what the guy had in mind, squaring it away with...some older man." He swallowed.

"I think he'd agree it's like you said though. What's mine has to be yours or it doesn't work." She tried to meet his eyes with a slow, subtle shrug of her shoulders. "On top of that, I'm starting to figure out we get along a lot better when we're both getting laid."

There was a shift to his jaw and the whole set of him, like he was clenching and unclenching at the same time, and when he moved it was seemingly something he'd been raring to do for these long minutes with the resigned swiftness of it: he swept up that blanket, shaking it out and bringing it over to her.

She was immediately reassured by the way he firmly caped it around her, rubbing down her shoulders a bit. "Wear a coat, you fool kid," he muttered.

She moved into him, resting her head on his chest, amazed at the simple comfort of it when his arms wrapped and settled around her.

They fell quiet, but later, she'd hear him say her name again. She liked the sound of that.


End file.
